THEGAYUK

Tag: Gay Plays

The latest reviews and news about gay plays in London and around the UK.

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Haram Iran

    THEATRE REVIEW | Haram Iran

    ★★★★★ | Haram Iran

    CREDIT: Above The Stag
    CREDIT: Above The Stag

    Two young men were publicly hanged in a square in Mashhad, Iran on 19th July 2005. The new play Haram Iran tells this horrific story.

    Ayaz Marhoni and Mahmoud Asgari were both teenage boys who liked to hang out together. But it was suspected that these two young men had a homosexual affair, though the true nature of their crime had never actually been confirmed. But they were publicly executed after being convicted on the trumped up charges of raping a 13-year old boy.

    The Above the Stag theatre in Vauxhall has produced a play that re-enacts and tries to give credence and understanding to the story of these two young men, and their lives, and their execution. It’s an amazing and relevant play.

    Ayaz (Viraj Juneja) and Mahmoud (Andrei Costin) play ball, study together and hang out at Ayaz’s house. They’re fast becoming good friends, enough so that it makes Fareed (Merch Husey) jealous. Mahmoud spends a lot of time at Ayaz’s house, in his bedroom, just hanging out. Ayaz is obsessed with books, books that his mother (Silvana Malmone) has illegally kept as she’s not allowed to have them because of Sharia law.

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    Ayaz is most enraptured by The Catcher in the Rye, and he reads passages of the book to Mahmoud. Some of the passages are sexual, making the young men a bit turned on. One day Ayaz notices huge marks on Mahmoud’s back, caused by whippings inflicted on him by his father. Ayaz rubs oil on Mahmoud’s back, but it’s this act, witnessed by Fareed, which causes their downfall. Ayaz is initially charged with corrupting, and penetrating Mahmoud, is thrown in jail, and repeatedly raped by the prison guard (Fanos Xenofos). Eventually they are both charged with consensual homosexual acts and the judge (George Savvides) punishes them to death.

    ALSO READ: Gay Air France flight attendants fear for their lives if forced to travel to newly opened route to Iran

    Haram Iran is a hugely important play that highlights the brutality and injustice that these two young innocent men endured in Iran. While not every scene in Haram Iran might not have actually taken place, what is fact is the murder at the hands of the Iranian government of these two young men.

    Directed by Gene David Kirk with brutal and emotional intensity, Haram Iran was written by Lawyer Jay Paul Deratany, who happened to find the story online. And each member of the cast are excellent. Juneja and Costin are both very believable as Ayez and Mahmoud, young and innocent but punished nonetheless. Maimone as Ayaz’s mother is superb in her role. Xenofos is very scary (and a bit too believable) as the prison guard who shows no mercy, while and Savvides is downright cold, mean and heartless as the judge.

    Haram Iran is a brutal yet delicate story of two young men who didn’t deserve to die because of who they were.

    Haram Iran plays at Above The Stag until the 1st May 2016

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Alright Bitches

    ★★★★★ Alright Bitches | Winter blues getting you down on your knees, feeling the cold-finger from old Jack Frost or just in need of some sun, sand and seamen?

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  • THEATRE REVIEW | 5 Guys Chillin’

    THEATRE REVIEW | 5 Guys Chillin’

    Five gay, short-sporting, horny promiscuous guys with gobs of liquid G, copious consignments of crystal meth, in a smog of monotone club beats opens up a whole production-line of tinned STI’d-worms.  ★★★

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  • THEATRE REVIEW | Alright Bitches, Above The Stag

    THEATRE REVIEW | Alright Bitches, Above The Stag

    ★★★ Alright Bitches | Let’s go on a trip to Gran Canaria via Above the Stag Theatre in their newly-penned play ‘Alright Bitches.’

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  • THEATRE REVIEW | Dina Martina “Sitting Ovations”

    Would you willingly embrace artistic schizophrenia?

    Even fiercely kiss your inner, self-hating, subconscious bigot? Join the club. It’s a deliberate, artistic strategy stunningly deployed by stellar gay stars Penny Arcade and Franko B, the spectacular collision of two opposing points of view.

    Arguably first expressed in literature by Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Imp Of The Perverse’ and refined as ‘DoubleSpeak’ by George Orwell’s 1984, it’s contrarianism writ large as art. Which is where manic, barely-sane comic Dina Martina – the probable incest brat of Family Guy’s Stewie Griffin and Ronald McDonald – comes storming in.

    Hailing from Seattle, USA, she’s 301 pounds of deeply skewed fun, a human CGI ball of deeply silly putty.

    So why mention her size? Because it’s the raw material of her art, darlings, Dina’s comic rocket-fuel, like Jack Dee’s trademark misery. ‘I stick to a high-sodium diet for that lush, larger-than-life look’, she giggles, her huge, plus-size clown’s mouth dilating like a gynaecologist’s nightmare.

    Think Heath Ledger’s Joker squeezed in a ball-gown cursed with Michael Jackson’s falsetto, and you too might run screaming for the exit. But wait; this funky assassin in a fright-wig only has one, single target, her own, all-too-willing self. Zoning in on personal pain with the exquisite virtuosity of the Saw torture-flick franchise, Dina masterfully misleads us from moment one.

    ‘I live a life without purpose’ she sadly observes, but who could possibly take this cosy, human cupcake seriously? And that’s precisely the point; we’re being taken for a brilliantly contrary ride by a Wizard of Oz Munchkin with the super-shrewd crowd perception of Sigmund Freud.

    But even with hindsight, it’s hard to adequately conjure Dina’s utterly demented stage entrance. Grinning like a slaughtered, Hallowe’en pumpkin, all Sergeant Pepper frock-coat and ballooning flesh, she pipes out inane, disco lyrics like a hooker on helium.

    How do we take her? At face value? Not quite. See, no matter how twisted you are, there’s always someone more extreme. Take dog poo; amateurs eat it dumped and stale, but dedicated gourmets suck it straight out. Just like comedy, in fact, and Dina’s surgically precise freak-show.

    And I’m in awe. Frankly, she’s attempting – and pulling off – a knife-edge balance of audience sympathies, by deliberately playing gay public poison Number One, the mincing, often self-loathing cliché. Never met one? Then check out John Inman and Larry Grayson on vintage TV. Still guaranteed to give gay rights activists instant heart attacks, Inman, Grayson and company were the utterly bland, acceptable face of homosexuality for heterosexuals.

    Try that now, and you’ll be as ostracised as white actors in blackface playing to Afro-Caribbean audiences. But remarkably, Dina embodies that fluffy, yucky stereotype – the target of mass straight derision – and still melts modern-day gay heartstrings.

    And mercifully, Dina’s Sitting Ovations is utterly removed from the vile, exploitative voyeurism of Soho’s deeply morally dubious Box club. Instead, she’s conceptually elegant, a drag Noel Coward of devastating double-takes and exquisitely dry, social dissections. ‘I am currently single’ she quips, ‘due to an unspoken agreement between me and men’.

    Okay, so the subtlety’s often swamped in a pell-mell parade of costume changes and video clips of spoof 1980s pop tunes, but it bites. Dina’s cracked, sectioned-on-glee-pills voice sweetly trills of infants raised on booze-filled pacifiers, and middle-aged housewives memorably disfigured by ‘Necrospheres’, facial fillers harvested from spoiled corpses. In other words, USA today through a gorgeously dark, twisted gay looking-glass Oscar Wilde would’ve killed to glance at.

    But there’s far more to ‘Sitting Ovations’ than faux-naive vignettes of the grotesque, distasteful and gaggingly twee. Arguably most memorable is a moody, extended reminiscence of an encounter with a (frustratingly unnamed) vintage Hollywood legend. Young, gauche and dumb, Dina’s fabulously dismissed by the aged, but still super-chic madam stabbing a prawn in her cocktail and holding it aloft.

    ‘This empty husk of a formerly vital creature’ she hisses to a suddenly tomb-silent room, ‘reminds me of you’. Just like anyone rash enough to risk Dina’s quick, eviscerating, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde wit, in fact. Me, I’m shrewd enough to stay way out the firing line; Dina’s an ongoing, monster talent steam-rolling any unwary opposition, and sometimes – like many reluctant celibates – it’s best to just say yes.

    At the Soho Theatre until 24th October 2015

  • THEATRE REVIEW | 5 Guys Chillin At The Kings Head Theatre

    5 Guys Chillin’ is a verbatim drama adapted from over 50 hours of anonymous interviews about the world of chem-sex on the gay scene. ★★

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  • THEATRE REVIEW | Casa Valentina – The best show in London about Transvestites

    There’s a house in the Catskill mountains in upstate New York where several men go to dress up in women’s clothing. It’s also a new play by Harvey Fierstein called ‘Casa Valentina’ now playing at the Southwark Playhouse. ★★★★

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  • THEATRE REVIEW | McQueen, Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London

    Crass yob or fashion god? Both, actually. All bile, venom and spunk, Alexander McQueen was a mutant oik messiah, a sartorial serial-killer maniacally slashing mediocrity into mouth-watering magnificence. ★★★★

    But that’s only when his brutally bi-polar, chemsex-twisted muse flew, of course, and new play McQueen – where he’s called Lee, his preferred name throughout – unflinchingly skewers his fatal, full-stop bungee-jump into oblivion.

    If the plot’s simple, the treatment, like McQueen himself, is insolently audacious. It’s the night of McQueen’s suicide, and an anxious Lee – (Stephen Wight) is surprised late at night by impulsive house intruder Dahlia (Carly Bawden).

    Instantly, Dahlia’s nerdy, conflicted, fan-girl worship acts as mental crystal-meth to Lee, and triggers an elegiac night of non-stop revelations. Burst after imagistic burst reveals Lee’s muses, mentors, likings and loathings, collapsing time and space with shockingly raw character expóses.

    That’s where McQueen truly impresses. If his supposedly blunt, scumbag genius was secretly held in contempt by snobs – Givenchy called him ‘le football thug’ – Lee in reality was painfully self-aware and insightful. One scathing scene gorgeously massacres smug faux-sophistication; a vapid reporter’s dissection of a woman is witheringly undone by Lee’s breezily compassionate take.

    So forget strict, dull, lazy biography nailed dead and rotting to the stage. Instead, this is fraught, suicide theatre superbly deployed as a multi-media, psychic minefield. Mime, pumping catwalk themes and video backdrops forensically flesh out Lee’s screaming inner self with an assurance clumsy naturalism would kill for.

    It’s an exact, brilliantly nuanced barometer of a frenzied gay genius’s mind. Time and again, music indelibly stains the action and spotlights Lee’s moods, from Nirvana’s brooding ‘Come As You Are’ to the hallucinatory grandeur of Handel’s Sarabande. And linear logic, throughout, is blatantly sacrificed for wrenchingly exact, emotional precision.

    That’s McQueen’s towering strength, shatteringly used in Lee’s lynchpin exchange with fashionista Isabella Blow, his triple-goddess muse, patron and financial angel.

    As played by Tracy-Ann Oberman, Blow’s a virtuoso study in slinky, fatally insecure hauteur. Both terminally damaged, she and Lee cling like frightened children to each other, as needy, emotionally naked and iconic as Rolling Stone magazine’s cover of John Lennon cradled by Yoko Ono.

    But that beautiful innocence makes only half of a shocking, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf brutality. It’s as horribly fascinating as watching slow, incremental torture, a frenzied kaleidoscope of pain, grief, betrayal and back-stabbing, as Blow’s callously thrown aside, and Lee’s vicious need to succeed shapes his signature, ‘savage beauty’ ethic.

    Directly sourced from Darwin’s take on nature – ‘red in tooth and claw’ – Lee’s manic, unstable, all-or-nothing creative process was pure Russian Roulette. Onstage, nightmare despair follows each ecstatic peak, awesomely mimicked by surging son et lumiere effects, as Lee, anxious, fragile and broken, exits his unbearable, trampoline existence to Marilyn Manson’s nihilistic, misfit anthem, ‘Beautiful People’.

    Oddly inspirational, a slow-burn triumph of subtle but often savage insight, McQueen deliberately spits on hysterical, West End Wendy fireworks. Instead, it’s far more rewarding; resonant, fully adult theatre worthy of Tony Kushner and Patrick Marber, and more remarkably contemporary than either.

    Until 7 November 2015. Tickets: 020 7930 8800; trh.co.uk

    By Sasha DeSuinn | @msSashaDarling

  • THEATRE REVIEW | The Sum Of Us

    A father who loves and accepts his gay son is the theme of the new play ‘The Sum of Us.’ ★★★★

    In 1994, a young Russell Crowe played the gay son in the movie version of The Sum of Us which was originally staged as a play in New York City in 1990. Now a new version of the play ‘The Sum of Us,’ which has never played in the UK, has just opened at the Above the Stag Theatre in Vauxhall.

    Harry (Sephen Connery-Brown) is a forty-something widower raising his twenty-something young son Jeff (Tim McFarland), who happens be gay. Harry is not bothered about his son being gay, he actually encourages Jeff to go out and meet other guys, to enjoy life while you can while you are young. And Harry doesn’t mind when Jeff brings other guys over to their home. Jeff is good-looking and athletic with a very positive look on life, but he says there’s a space in his heart that is empty, a space that could be filled by another man. When he meets someone he likes (Greg – played by Rory Hawkins), he’s immediately smitten. But it’s Harry who interrupts the two young men who are on the couch getting to know each other. Harry says a bit too much about Jeff, and their close father and son relationship makes Greg feel insecure about his own relationship with his father. Meanwhile Harry, after being a widower for a number of years, also starts dating – he feels like it’s time to get out there and meet another woman. And he does. Her name is Joyce (Annabel Pemberton), and her and Harry are getting on like wildfire. But when she learns that he has a gay son, she just can’t accept this. Firstly she’s angry that Harry didn’t tell her when they started dating, secondly she just can’t accept gay people at all. Even after Harry proposes to her, she just doesn’t want to see him anymore. So thus we have a father and a son who both yearn to be with someone yet obstacles get in their way. And as Harry tells Jeff, he is the sum of us, the sum of him and his late wife, and the sum of his grandparents and great-grandparents. Actually, we are all the sum of us, and this is the message of the play.

    Above the Stag Theatre really sets the bar high on this one. Their previous shows had names such as ‘Rent Boy: The Musical’ and ‘Bathhouse: The Musical.’ However, they have now produced a play that is serious, heartwarming and very well-acted. The Sum of Us is a story that most gay men may not relate to; who can say that their fathers have whole heartedly accepted their homosexuality. But the play, written by David Stevens, who also wrote the film version and the original play version, successfully combines the son’s and father’s search for love and the close relationship they have with each other. And in the end, the message is that we all want someone to love and someone to love us, no matter whether you are gay or straight.

    Connery-Brown is great as Harry, as is McFarland as Jeff. They have a real rapport as father and son, and even resemble each other a bit. Hawkins and Pemberton are fine as the other halves, who may or may not wind up in the men’s lives. The set, down to the details of the1990’s script, cleverly goes from a living room to a park, in this cute theatre that is nice and cozy with a bar to match.

    The Sum of Us is playing at Above the Stag Theatre until October 4th. Tickets can be bought here:

    http://www.abovethestag.com/shows/

    Buy tickets now – it’s selling out fast!

  • THEATRE REVIEW | F*cking Men

    I was all set in my mind to hate this; I imagined it being hammy, awkward and amateur. It was, after all, a play about gay sex lives to be performed in the back of a pub. I had images in my mind of either uncomfortable soft-core porn or over-pretentious dramatics involving a man in clown makeup reading poetry and eating an apple.

    The play follows the intertwining lives of 10 gay men, tackling the usual gay issues of fidelity, trust and sex. Yes, of course, there’s a character who’s an escort in there. It wouldn’t be gay theatre if there wasn’t.

    The setting was simple, if amateurish, reminding me of the various performances we put on during A-level drama exam week. Although if the boys in my school looked ANYTHING like the cast I would never have left.

    Which brings us on to the most important part, the cast. They were fantastic. Those who weren’t stunningly gorgeous were hilarious and heartfelt. In fact many were gorgeous and heartfelt, a combination you don’t actually see in real life… so maybe a bit of realism lost there. Some of the acting was a little laboured; feeling over the top and out of place for such a small and intimate setting. When there were fight scenes you heard the fake slap, and when there were screaming matches you got wet. And not in a good way.

    The initial intimacy of the play can be a bit overwhelming, but the rhythm of the scene changes is consistently good and you’re easily moved from one character’s story to another. Some of the best characters aren’t introduced until towards the end, by that I mean both the funniest character and then arguably the hottest character. Despite its low budget, the show is still appealing to a wide audience, nothing too gay niche to prevent the characters from being relatable.

    I am forced to wonder, however, if the play would have been as engrossing if the cast weren’t as beautiful as they were. The good thing is you don’t need to find out.

    Entertaining and full of eye-candy. Go and see F*cking Men at the King’s Head Theatre, Islington before the end of it’s run in September (extended for another month due to popular demand).

    Worth it even if you’re just looking for new entries in your spank bank.

  • THEATRE REVIEW | The Clinic, Kings Head Theatre

    What happens when you go to a clinic? Well, if you’ve been taking drugs and having lots of unsafe sex, then you might be more likely be HIV+. The new play “The Clinic” explores this scenario, and so much more.

    Not so much a play but more of a health education lesson, “The Clinic” is produced by David Stuart, the Lead Substance Use Advisor at 56 Dean Street (a London sexual health clinic based in the heart of Soho), and written by Patrick Cash (writer for QX Magazine).

    We are introduced to characters that we may recognize and identify with, portrayed by a cast of London scenesters. DJ Stewart Who plays a sexual health advisor at the clinic; he used to be a drug addicted party animal but now he dispenses HIV advice and results to men much younger than him.

    Then there’s the wealthy businessman (Matthew Hodson) who enjoys sex with young men and thinks that he can buy them his love and affection. He’s also in HIV denial.

    Zacharian Fletcher is the confused young man, an extreme party boy who likes to go clubbing and take drugs, not necessarily in that order. He’s also into chillouts (orgies). And he’s got HIV. He meets (via Grinder) Damien Killen’s character, a young respectable guy who seems to have a good head on his shoulders, is handsome with a good body, who came to London only to somehow become HIV+. He feels like he’s no longer desired but now damaged.

    Then there’s Shirley (Pretty Miss Cairo). She runs a Vauxhall beauty clinic which acts as a sanctuary for the drugged out boys when the clubs close.

    These characters may not be real people, but they are composites of characters that Cash met and interviewed after 56 Dean Street commissioned him to write this play. He interviewed not just the people who work at the clinic but some of the patients as well.

    It’s a bare bones production, played in the very warm King’s Head Theatre in Angel (take a bottle of water with you, and a hand fan). And the cast should be admired for taking part in this play. It’s difficult at times to hear some of the dialogue (Stewart Who seems to be muttering his words while Fletcher is so soft-spoken I could hardly hear him at all), but Hodson (who is perfect as the villian), Miss Cairo and Killeen more than make up for the play’s faults.

    And as you enter the theatre before the play starts, you are given a glossary of terms referred to in the play. There were several words in the glossary that I had never heard of before, so I did learn something new by going to see the play ‘The Clinic.’

    It’s a perfect setting for a gay play, a place where we’ve all been to.

    ‘The Clinic’ is now playing at the Kings Head Theatre in London until August 29th.

    To buy tickets, please click here: